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Air-travel maths could limit spread of disease

日期：2019-03-02 04:07:06 作者：西门笺奴 阅读：

By Will Knight The mathematical formulae that describe people’s movement through global air travel could be harnessed to control the spread of deadly diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) or influenza, researchers say. Luís Amaral and colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, analysed publicly available data on available flights between global airports and used the information to construct a network of 27,051 links. They found that global air travel follows a simple but skewed mathematical rule, with important hubs not necessarily in the most relevant geographical locations. And the researchers say the discovery could help health experts control the spread of deadly diseases, which can be rapidly carried to new locations via air travellers. There is evidence to suggest that air travel may play a major role in future disease pandemics. The spread of SARS, in March 2003, has been linked to air travel. And, other diseases that might spread in a similar way include influenza and even smallpox – if it should be released – which have similar incubation periods, allowing travellers to carry the illness aboard a plane to a new destination before falling ill. Amaral’s team found that this global travel network followed a “scale-free” pattern, meaning some network nodes are much more important than others. Other scale-free networks include the internet, the stock market, power grids and the distribution of sexually transmitted diseases. However, the researchers discovered that air travel hubs were not necessarily based in the most logical geographical locations. For example, Paris and Frankfurt had similar traffic levels, but Paris was a more crucial link in the network. This is because politics and economics also play a role establishing connections between different locations – reflecting trade relationships between different countries, for example. And understanding which hubs are most important could prove vital to managing the spread of disease through the network, Amaral says. “Something like SARS makes these hubs the places that you want to impose barriers,” he told New Scientist. “Although it would depend, to an extent, on where the outbreak occurred.” Mike Ryan, director of the World Health Organization’s outbreak response unit, says this information could prove invaluable to health experts. “Computers are never going to replace expertise in risk assessment,” he says. “But in the future this will allow us to look at theoretical scenarios and at how different interactions would impact them.” But Ryan points out that other elements need to be factored into such models, such as the availability of different potential vaccines. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 102, p 7794) More on these topics: